A panel at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach exploded into controversy on Friday afternoon, after an audience member defended slavery as good for African-Americans.

The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst.

After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, “why can’t we just have segregation?” noting the Constitution’s protections for freedom of association.

“Well Higgs my bosons!” The Universe stammered, clearly taken aback. “You seem to have a rather valid point there.”

And with that, The Universe slouched off, dejected. I felt badly about the whole affair, but then I remembered that I have food and housing and I’m only metaphorically shackled and beaten for it on a daily basis.

[UPDATE] Via the comments, and the man in the corner said “Boy, I’m gonna warn ya” and it turned into a ballroom blitz. BALLROOM BLITZ!

I can’t see the cheering or applauding. Maybe a little. It looked more like a stunned audience, one woman sitting on a chair in view of a camera looks shocked and seems to mouth “Can you believe he said that?” The sentiment is obviously appalling. That the guy could express it and it be tolerated is disturbing.

How does K. Carl Smith not just weep himself to sleep every night? I mean, THESE are the people he’s trying to reach out to, and deep down he must know they simply HATE him because he’s black, no matter what Conservitard nonsense he spouts.

CPAC knowingly allowed known White “Nationalists” groups to attend and interact act the conference this year. Now who woulda thought that lovers of the KKK would actually disrupt a panel (no matter how stupid or stockholm syndromy it may be) headed by an African American

The link here at TPM has more than the Think Progress piece on what happened and believer you me, it will make you even more appalled.

Yeah, but he either doesn’t understand, or worse, doesn’t care that (1) every word was recorded, (2) the intartoobz exist, and (3) people, even some who might be conservative or inclined to vote GOBP, will generalize from the specific and assume he stands for the whole movement/party.

@TooManyJens: According to those right-wing blogs, everyone both attending and presenting at this panel is surely a liberal plant, with the entire event deftly coordinated and performed for the sole purpose of making conservatives look bad.

Sad thing is that, as the nameless sad and angry white dude( or dudette) said in the TPM article, white dudes (without good educations or wealthy families) are getting beat up (along with everyone else, BTW). But the white dudes at CPAC are encouraging those very policies. But better to indulge in groupthink racial fantasies, I guess.

The TPM article mentions a guy dressed up in Revolutionary War garb. The fact that a person can read that and not raise an eyebrow tells you how this has devolved into the reactionary fantasist loon party. I wonder if this small gummint state righer no welfare patriot was supposed to be Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, or Alexander Hamilton (or George Washington, even, a life long Hamiltonian who freed his slaves and gave them a private affirmative action training fund)? You have to wonder.

Asking this twit whether he’d be grateful for the ‘food and housing’ if it also went along with having absolutely no cntrol over your life. Your overseer being able to sell off your wife and children. Being able to work you to death and even outright kill you without repercussion?
You don’t want to there, cause I think there’s still this attitude that the brown people should be grateful we ‘liberated’ them from darkest Africa and brought them into Western Civilization. So any bumps along the way, they should just get over it.

CPAC is a freak show – why any surprise that the freaks let their freak flags fly there? I for one am glad they congregate in one place so we can nuke them from space to get their freak on under the cold glare of the lights so we can get a good look at them.

Finally, some super insight on the battle for racial equality from Idaho. Did you know Rosa Parks was a champion for states’ rights? Me neither.

The No. 3 Republican leader in the Idaho House says he made a “slight mistake” when he described Rosa Parks as a champion of states’ rights.”One little lady got tired of the federal government telling her what to do,” Assistant Majority Leader Brent Crane of Nampa said during Wednesday’s debate on Gov. Butch Otter’s bill establishing a state-run health insurance exchange. “I’ve reached that point, Mr. Speaker, that I’m tired of giving in to the federal government.”

I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked that Mr. Crane is government moocher son of another government moocher, who’s busying himself fighting government while eying a higher position in government.

Crane, 38, is in his seventh year in the Legislature. His father, Ron, is a Canyon County political legend who served 16 years in the House before winning four terms as state treasurer.A confidant of Congressman Raul Labrador, Crane is high on the list of potential candidates for 1st District Congress should Labrador run for governor next year. Crane called his misstatement “a slight mistake” regarding “a little fact.” Five times in our five-minute conversation he said he was “disappointed” about my writing about his error. “You knew my heart, you knew what I was trying to say. I’m saying, just like Rosa Parks, ‘Enough is enough.'”

It’s because to sustain a segregated society, you have to maintain a brutal, fascistic, unconstitutional police state.

Your implicit assumption that someone who would say those things out loud in public, with media in the room, would have a problem with a brutal police state seems to me to not be well founded. But that could just be me.

Not just at any part of the CPAC freak show, but at the minority outreach event! The event designed to show that Republicans aren’t as racist as people think and that non-whites shouldn’t be leery of them! Topped off by some yahoo literally saying what so many racist right-wingers imply: that black people ought to be grateful to slave owners.

I ask you, how can any of you think the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor after this?

@quannlace: I was told by my fifth grade teacher, when Roots aired, that we should watch it, and slavery was horrible, but cruel slave-owners were really very rare, and we should remember that most slaves were better off than white factory workers in the north.

The saddest part is that attendees at that panel are the least racist people CPAC has to offer. Every other person at the conference didn’t even care enough about minority outreach to attend the panel.

@Spaghetti Lee: I guess the organizers are trying to put on a good show, display, dog and pony show, PR event, subliminal PR training session, whatever it was supposed to be.

They forgot about their audience, you know, the dupes they have trained and spoon fed hate propaganda for going on 40 year now. Too bad.

I think any secret liberal agent nonsense will be fed to their own insane asylum for crowd control. looks like only one ‘disenfranchised’ loser sparked it off, but way too many sympathetic bigots backing him were interviewed afterward in stories for that nonsense to work on anyone else.

Asking this twit whether he’d be grateful for the ‘food and housing’ if it also went along with having absolutely no cntrol over your life.

The point about masters giving their slaves food and shelter tells you a lot about the conservative worldview. They’re perfectly happy to ignore that it was the slaves who grew the food and built the shelters in the first place. Instead, the slaves were supposed to be grateful to receive anything back for their labor, even if it was barely enough to live. It’s exactly the same mentality that thinks it’s fine for employers to deny their employees contraceptives because it’s against the employer’s religion. We’re supposed to be happy to have any healthcare at all.

not often you see a racist who almost understands what the word “enfranchised” means enough to admit he thinks that black people’s votes counting as much as white people’s votes means he’s being disenfranchised. I guess we’re lucky he majored in English.

Stories like this don’t really surprise me anymore. The Tea Party tendency is no longer just the Republican party’s unruly child, is it? It’s taken over, like the kid in the Twilight Zone episode who can, just by wishing, make bad things happen to grown-ups who cross him. You see slightly more refined versions of Scott Terry in the Ted Cruzes and the Paul Ryans, but they’re all of the same ilk.

Also too, for all those (including me) thinking that Scott Terry might be so over-the-top as to be an actual plant, commenter Gus over at LGF did a little gumshoeing, and found out that, no, he’s for real. (Link goes to a Google webcache.)

Attendees interviewed by TPM afterwards expressed outrage at the way the event turned out. Not at Terry and Heimbach — they were mad at Brown for her interruptions.
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Chad Chapman, 21, one of the few black attendees, said overall he enjoyed the event — except “there were lots of interruptions, mainly because of the woman.”
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I asked whether he was concerned about the question from Terry and Heimbach.
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“No they were just telling the truth,” he said. You mean you agree blacks are systematically disenfranchising whites, I asked?
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“I listen to anybody’s point of view, it doesn’t really matter,” he said.

That the media can see the ‘best and the brightest’ the GOP can offer at something like this and still treat them not only credibly but like they’re still infinitely morally, fiscally, etc. superior to the Dems.

This should be a Sistah Souljah moment for the entire mainstream media. It’s not.

When are these conservatives going to realize that we black people are not just voting for Democrats, we are voting against Republicans? Many times more against Red than for Blue- you can’t unite any people as strongly as Republicans have united black folk against them except with fear.

So does Jefferson Davis Beauregard Nathan Forrest Smith XXIII show up on Hannity tonight to snivel about his words being taken out of context? Or is there anyone in the family who taught him to think like this smart enough to say, “Son, never mind all that, you go down to Del Boca Vista and stay with Aunt Verna for a few weeks. Keep a low profile and tell the neighbors you’re recovering from back surgery.”

Darn straight. I think mister Popkey might just be reassigned to the potato desk if he keeps committing acts of journalism.

Sarah Vowell had a great piece on TAL last weekend on white folks citing Rosa Parks to support their fight against various perceived attacks on their Freedoms. It was well-done, if cringe-evoking, and this story would have fit in like a glove.

I am reminded, also too, of a PUMA who screamed at me in early June of 2008 that she was being disenfranchised because Obama was going to get the nomination. Is it really such a big, hard word for so many? I s’pose we relegate it to the bin of perpetually upended and terminally abused concepts like “freedom of speech” and “tolerance” and “censorship.”

@bemused: I know, right? I imagine a lot of 50-year-old+ white guys sidling up to the bar and saying to a black guy, “So, that Michael Jordan’s a helluva player, ain’t he?” Or maybe, “When are you gonna admit that your boy was born in Kenya?” (expecting a chuckle of agreement, no doubt). Is there a group of human beings less capable of self-examination than the modern Republican?

I know my poor beleaguered southern liberal friends hate this kind of “joking”, but I sometimes do actually wonder what things might be like if we declined to let the confederate states back into the Union, at least in terms of representation in Congress.

@Skipjack: And they’re working on losing the votes of Asians, Latinos, Gays and women too. But the GOP got 65% of White male votes, so I guess they still feel good. After all, in their world, only White males count as human.

In fact, I have it on good authority that the person who was calling himself “Scott Terry” is actually ….

Ah, never mind, I can’t divulge …

… by the way, I haven’t seen posts from DougJ recently. Anyone know where he might be? I seem to remember him saying something about going off to troll for some “big ones by the Potomac”, but I thought he meant catfish.

” she was being disenfranchised because Obama was going to get the nomination ”

Well, to be honest, I feel disenfranchised, (unconstitutionally so if people would just understand!) by the fact that I can’t personally run everything. Or get whatever I want. That’s how democracy works, right?

After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, “why can’t we just have segregation?”

I’m certainly not saying this didn’t happen, but:
– I don’t hear that on the video. Does anyone else?
– The TPM link details the discussion on the video, but makes no mention of that volatile comment. Why?
– The ONLY source making the claim that Terry said “why can’t we just have segregation?” is Think Progress.
– Think Progress actually interviewed Terry after the video clip (good for them!), but did not ask him about him about that (alleged) quote. That borders on journalistic malpractice.

Now clearly Terry is a racist, as revealed on the video, and also by the subsequent Think Progress interview. But it just seems really strange to me that nobody except Think Progress clearly heard that “muttered” remark, and even stranger that Think Progress did not confront Terry about his “segregation” comment afterwards.

@Mandalay: Your concern is duly noted. And of course, with the long history of lying and inaccurate reporting by Think Progress, we can’t trust what they say, since if it’s not recorded on video, it didn’t happen, naturally. Where’s James O’keefe to record that stuff when we need him, huh?

Please do hurry up with your investigation though, since it would be really nice to know THE TRUTH(!) about that one tiny little specific detail you are so concerned about, and rightly of course, before we go around and do such a crazy thing as suggesting the Republican Party is filled with racists, especially at an event such as CPAC.

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

Seems to me calling for “separate but equal” would be a step forward for this guy. You do get the whole point of a “Booker T Washington” Republican when this guy uses it? “unified like a hand, but separate like a finger”? “I love my people and my culture”?

If you don’t mind a little friendly advice? step away from the Reasonable Contrarian bong. You’re hitting it too hard. Pass it back to Keith G.

The best/deepest reporting seems to be this Atlantic Wire article; it’s written by someone who was on the scene, and some of the muddy timelines of the “who was talking when” that the other articles seem to elide over, this journo does a good job of filling in.

The TPM article mentions a guy dressed up in Revolutionary War garb. The fact that a person can read that and not raise an eyebrow tells you how this has devolved into the reactionary fantasist loon party

I said nothing about being unfair, and explicitly stated that “clearly Terry is a racist”. But I am unconvinced that Terry stated the words that Think Progress attributed to him.

Think Progress clearly misquoted him on a less contentious matter, stating that he said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?”, when Terry can be heard on the video actually saying “For giving him food and shelter all those years…” (which has been reported independently).

Now when an organization blatantly misquotes one remark, and quotes another volatile remark not reported by any other source, and then chooses not to confront the speaker about the alleged volatile remark, I am skeptical.

Can you confirm that you are certain that Terry stated “why can’t we just have segregation?”? If so, what is your justification for that certainty, given the issues raised?

@shortstop: Last year, it was the foreign exchange students working third shift in a Hershey’s warehouse via a third-party contractor. Those students also struck. Time for the State Department to rein in the bad actors.

@Mandalay: Well, I can appreciate not wanting to be fooled. We see lots of examples of some wingnut “news source” reporting something that is factually untrue (and could have been discovered to be as much with just a teensy bit of investigative reporting). It’s naive to suppose that leftwing news sources never do such a thing. Nonetheless, considering how outrageous the guy’s recorded/publicly posted words were, I think I’d be more focused on that.

I know my poor beleaguered southern liberal friends hate this kind of “joking”, but I sometimes do actually wonder what things might be like if we declined to let the confederate states back into the Union, at least in terms of representation in Congress.

IMO, they should have abolished all the traitor states and redrawn the boundaries. Break up the existing upper class social ties and let the factions from say east Alabama and west Georgia and south Tennessee waste their energy on fighting each other for dominance in the hierarchy in the new state of Sherman, instead of using that energy to suppress the blacks.

The Allies disbanded Prussia after WWII and that didn’t do Germany any harm at all (they left Bavaria in tact though, and that is a reactionary hellhole).

@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What is Scott Terry talking about, “my culture”? It is absolutely impossible to be a white person from the South and have a culture that has not been affected by slavery and the culture of African slaves. The food white folks eat, the way we talk, our music, the stories we tell – they are all influenced by the unwilling immigrants who raised the food our ancestors ate and often raised our ancestors themselves.

It is absolutely impossible to be a white person from the South and have a culture that has not been affected by slavery and the culture of African slaves.

I suspect that’s what’s bothering him, frankly.

And, let’s face it, it’s pretty much impossible to live anywhere in the United States and not be culturally influenced by slavery and former slaves. If you’ve ever listened to rock music of any kind, you’re sunk.

Nonetheless, considering how outrageous the guy’s recorded/publicly posted words were, I think I’d be more focused on that.

I see your point but I disagree.

There was certainly no need for Think Progress to misreport the truth about the racism of Terry (as they did). And their report is contradicted by several other sources including the Guardian, the Washington Post and Huffington Post (which surely would have pounced if Terry really did say “why can’t we just have segregation?”).

But in the long run the accuracy of reporting by Think Progress is far more important than the comments of a racist at a CPAC meeting. If we don’t treat all news sources with a degree of skepticism we will just be mindless cheerleaders for whatever information pleases us, and that is obviously the case for some posters on this thread.

Fox News watchers are frequently mocked on BJ for their gullibility, but some here are just as willing to take their gramme of soma.

@Darkrose:
#102. Don’t forget the mule. The mule was vital to plow the ground and for transportation. That is, if the mule wanted to. If that had happened, people could have been property owners and developed wealth. Built up capital. Had power. So no 40 acres and no mule.

What’s hilarious (or sad, or sadly hilarious) about that is that the only point of her post seems to be to say: “Look how non-racist I am! I talked to a minority plebe and even wrote a positive story about him!” The irony that the only black guy she could find at CPAC to use this way was the shoe-shine man doesn’t seem to have registered. “See, we conservatives love minorities! Especially when they keep to their proper, traditionally appropriate places in society!” Her next post will be about what a lovely girl Rosa in housekeeping is. Not that she’s ever actually spoken to Rosa, but she fluffs Jillian’s pillow to just the right softness, and that’s what’s really important.

Thanks for that link, which fully deepens my skepticism that Terry said the words “why can’t we just have segregation?”. Your link provides very detailed commentary on the discussion from someone who was sitting two seats away from Terry, yet she did not mention that he said those words.

How can that be? How can she have reported that conversation in great detail from two seats away, but failed to mention that he said “why can’t we just have segregation?”.

How can it be that no independent source has reported that Terry said “why can’t we just have segregation?”.

How can Think Progress, who blatantly misquoted another remark form Terry, have failed to ask Terry about his alleged “segregation” remark when they interviewed him after the discussion.

Now it is obviously unprovable that Terry did not say those words, and possibly he did, and he is clearly a racist regardless. But the evidence that he actually said “why can’t we just have segregation?” looks pretty flimsy to me.

What in the hell was the black guy selling at this little hatefest? I mean, we all have a niche market if we’re in sales, but what, exactly, would be the point of showing up at one of these clanfests and telling a lot of white people who should really know better by now, that they sound like racists, but he, the black guy, really understands and can show them how to stnnd and show that they aren’t.

These are the guys that howl about government intrusion in their lives; about the government taking away their guns and making them get healthcare. But, it’s A-OK to have Americans in slavery as long as they’re not white.